Introduction

AMD's Radeon HD 7970 has been on the market for a while now. The card introduced a new shader architecture and brought numerous improvements in power consumption. It later met heavy opposition from NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 680, which has caused HD 7970 pricing to go down in recent weeks.

MSI's Radeon HD 7970 Lightning is a heavily customized implementation of the HD 7970 with focus on performance and overclocking. The card uses a beefed up voltage regulation circuitry and massive dual-fan heatsink to ensure stable operation at MSI's increased clock speeds of 1070 MHz. Memory clock has gone up too, up to 1400 MHz. Thanks to recent price cuts across the HD 7900 Series, the MSI HD 7970 Lightning now retails at $520.